Yes, critical theories are philosophies often meant to be executed on behalf of "ends by whatever means." They're antithetical to liberalism. Liberalism has no

Yes, critical theories are philosophies often meant to be executed on behalf of "ends by whatever means." They're antithetical to liberalism. Liberalism has no ends, it's effectively JUST a description of means. If anything, the means are themselves the ends. Liberalism is content with asserting something like "freedom of speech is a fundamental mechanism for a functioning society." Critical theory instead asserts that those with power have demonstrated the capability to amplify certain speech and marginalize other speech. Because their goal is to maximize the power of those they assert to be marginalized, rather than having a principled position on speech, they'll instead leverage whatever tools at their disposal in order to do exactly what they condemned: amplify certain speech and marginalize other speech. This is the reason it's a common statement among these people to say "never attack tactics, only attack motives." The means are completely sidelined. Compare this to what I would consider to be a proper deconstruction of liberalism. Rather than saying "I have encountered a pattern where freedom of speech is not extended to all groups equally, therefore freedom of speech is an invalid ideal, and can only ever be used to uphold corrupted hierarchies," one could instead say "I consider any failure of freedom of speech to be an _implementation_ failure in need of examination and correction, rather than getting rid of the principle due to incidental failure to produce the outcomes I desire." The whole pattern employed by modern critical theory seems to work backwards from "these systems have failed to produce the outcomes I desire, and these outcomes should be evidence that the whole system is corrupted." They're basically horrible scientists.